Xu-Fu's Pet Guides are a welcoming community all around pet battles in World of Warcraft.

Created by Aranesh in 2015, the site has since grown immensely. It hosts hundreds of different strategies for pet challenges, tools to analyze and optimize your collection, and is localized in several languages.

All that is possible thanks to a group of dedicated contributors and visitors just like yourself! Be part of it, and enjoy your stay!

Site creator and admin:

Aranesh

Content Creator:

Montyr#2782

Nyari

schlumpf#2707

Strategy Curator:

DragonsAfterDark

Jagûar

Remte

Shenk

Localization:

Ashtor

Former Contributors:

Imortalls

Lea

LuckyTiger#14645

ollif

Rosqo

Thema#2231

Wazzak

The possibility for all registered users to upload their own strategies was extremely successful. Since then, Xu-Fu has grown immensely thanks to everyone who contributes. On a much smaller scale, however, we saw a number of strategies that were not up to the standards we set ... continue reading

I have some great news to share, and no, it's not WoW Classic related, sorry. It is, however, related to someone you have stumbled upon almost guaranteed if you've been using Xu-Fu to look up strategies in the last few months. So pretty much everyone who will read ... continue reading

The patch is live and with it the usual suspects - API problems ^^
- Importing or updating your pet collection from the armory currently returns zero pets. This is an issue on Blizzards side and we'll need to wait until it's been addressed.
- In the meanwhile, ... continue reading

In the last weeks, Xu-Fu got a lot of additional help, both from veteran Xu-Fu collaborators and new people. Most of the work has been put into guides and they are definitely worth a shout-out here.
- One by one, the page now hosts:
-
- <b><a href="continue reading

The recent maintenance paved the way for some big changes on Xu-Fu’s Pet Guides. If you joined us on Discord, you will have seen the beginnings of it already. Now it’s time to unveil the big news: Xu-Fu is going to transform from a page dedicated solely to providing ... continue reading

Activity has picked up on Xu-Fu and I’m really excited to introduce you to the latest addition in pet collection tools: The Pet Moocher! Not an April fools joke, it’s a real thing!
- Ever wanted to compare your collection to someone else for any duplicate, cageable ... continue reading

been having a problem for a few days with updating my pet collection. I don't see my server in the drop down list, I tried using another server and character. It updated the collection but When i try to use Magpie it doesn't recognize that I have any pets.

I know the issue isn't here as it also happens at warcraftpets as well.

I'm sorry to say, due to sudden unemployment, I've had to stop my monthly donation for the foreseeable future. I want to thank you for all the hard work and let you know I will continue to support this site again when I can.

Hey! Don't worry at all about the donation. Thank you so much for your support and donations, the page will go on and stay around. You focus on finding a positive future for yourself and I wish you all the best that you find a great new job soon!

Please stop make the page re-posting comments when reloding the page!
‌
Learned this today: posted a comment, came back later to see if there was any feedback, reloaded the page: the page posted a copy of my comment. That was not what I wanted. I just wanted to check if my comment was posted and if there were some responses. I did not want to post a copy of my comment from 5 hours ago. And, a humble guess, I think the majority of the users are not expecting such behavior either.

Nope, it didn’t. Otherwise I wouldn’t mention it. Using current Safari on macOS, haven’t checked it with FF. Sorry for the late reply; turned out that the site had logged me out silently, so I didn’t see any notifications.

OK. I’ll try it again with this comment reply. I’ll leave the page open and come back in a couple of hours to reload the page. (This was the scenario, IIRC. Though I’m not sure if the problematic comment was a real comment or a reply to a comment, like this one.) Anyway, I’ll report back then.

OK, have reloaded the page now (3 or 4 hours after posting) and… everything fine this time (that is, I got the confirmation dialog). So, no idea what did provoke the faulty behaviour the other day. The state of the cache? Or maybe I had some setting activated in the Develop menu that prevented the sheet from coming up?When/if it occurs again, I’ll post it here.

Hey! I used to have my Pet Collection imported onto the website, but it was deleted once I reconnected my battle.net account to set a character icon. Now when I try to import my collection again (even after removing the original connection), it reloads to a blank screen with "ssdfsds" in the corner.
I love the website and this is the only issue that I've ever encountered. I just wanted to bring it up! Thanks for all the wonderful work you do <3

In that Info box I only could squeeze-in the content by shortening many things, down to the gramatical limits, and by omitting some info. I know, I could continue in a comment in the comment section, but this doesn’t feel right. The essential infos should be in one place.

I’m also aware that 990 chars should be more than sufficient in most cases. But there are cases where more info is useful (like the above example), and unless there is a technical 990-characters-hard-limit, please give us more room. If someone really is misusing that box (what for?) you could always edit the post or/and contact the author.

I think we had a much stricter limit 2 weeks ago and I personally don't think this infobox needs more characters because it's there for SHORT creator comments to strategy basics or pet choices and IMHO not to explain every single RNG situation players can experience.

If you can reduce RNG with breed restrictions... then maybe it's better to add them to the pets and not explain what can go wrong with other breeds. Also, I don't see the need to comment on the level pets because that is something that belongs to your pet team (or Rematch strings if you like to add your specific ones).

Most people come here not to read walls of text, they look for the better-rated strategies that match their pet collections, copy&paste stuff they need to import into their addons and only come back if something goes horribly wrong and then mostly to find help in other peoples' comments who also struggled or to find a different team/strategy: I don't think many people wanna read about stuff that already happened to them, they mostly want to see solutions and it's the best way to have them in a well-optimized strategy&team already.

Be honest, does it help when I struggle with this specific strategy and then come back and find something like "if this is happening you are screwed" or "if this is happening and you want pet XP restart, otherwise you win without rewards for your level pet" in your creator comments? I don't think so.

This is not a basic forum so maybe it's better to continue with keeping things short ;-)

To me, certain character limits tend to be problematic not because of the length of actual content, but because of formatting tags and embedding taking up a lot of characters. This is something I experience on most of websites, not just this one, but the most aggravating issue over here is linking to user profiiles and other sources of strategies, which could be alleviated with internalisation of link paths and @mentions.

About the tooltips themselves… I don't have any clear conclusions one way or the other. Put an effort into it? It's ignored. Leave it alone to keep it tidy? You come out as oblivious and heartless. Same goes for strategies, a new one? Ignored on behalf of ones that took the spotlight first. And when it's actually noticed? It seems to outweigh another with 300+ flawless executions which somehow stays in the shadow. Therefore, I'm not sure one can account for every visitor upon creating the environment. :-) The cycle of (tamer) strife can be cruel, and I believe something needs to be done with it nevertheless – but sadly, enough of the philosophy, for at the moment the engineering of more basic aspects has to come first!

@Lazey, Part I (Sorry, the page freaks out when I’m trying to post my reply as one. So, I’ll try it in two steps ;)‌First and foremost, thanks for your reply and for your opinion. But I don’t agree with all of your points…‌

> I personally don't think this infobox needs more characters because it's there for SHORT creator comments to strategy basics or pet choices and IMHO not to explain every single RNG situation players can experience.‌IMO the part that really should be kept short and precise is the description (the steps). The Info box, I agree with you, should also be short, but if there is a need for more information, it should be dumped into the Info box. (Not into the description, not into the comments section, for two different reasons, but I think both are obvious.)‌Another possibilty would be to squeeze any meta info into the description before “Turn 1”. But this would be a cheap second Info box, and I don’t like the idea to abuse the form that way.‌> If you can reduce RNG with breed restrictions... then maybe it's better to add them to the pets and not explain what can go wrong with other breeds. ‌I think you are referring to the Env Bert strat I have linked. Basically I agree. But you might have noticed that I already had added min power to pet #2, in order to exclude some of the substitutes. Though, I didn’t wan’t to do the same with the Blazehaound (pet #1), because I think the strat is doable also with a suboptimal breed. But maybe you are right and I should just exclude any non-P/P breeds.

@Lazey, Part II
‌
> Also, I don't see the need to comment on the level pets because that is something that belongs to your pet team (or Rematch strings if you like to add your specific ones).‌
You are right here. The Rematch string is part of the Info box, and as such it should be parsed correctly. (The string that contains the correct and breed/damage-specific min health requirements). This should be enough, but, I think there are also folks that aren’t using Rematch. They also should know of the type-specific min health requirements. Unfortunatly the default forms of the page don’t offer any detailed entries for the min health. They only offer one entry (for all damage types), and I always put the worst-case min health there (for pets that are weak against the expected damage type)
‌
> Most people come here not to read walls of text, […] ‌
Well, I think, a “wall of of text” is not defined by the amount of characters. To create a wall of text you need two things: lots of characters, and lots of missing line breaks / paragraphs. I’m completely aware of that, and I’m always trying to section and format my texts in a manner that makes it usable for readers ;) I think the limit of 990 chars is not contributing to avoid walls of text. (It’s easy to build a a wall of text with only 500 chars, but I think you got what I mean…)
‌
> Be honest, does it help when I struggle with this specific strategy and then come back and find something like "if this is happening you are screwed" or "if this is happening and you want pet XP restart, otherwise you win without rewards for your level pet" in your creator comments? I don't think so. ‌
Good question. Me personally, when I use a new strat from somebody else, I always read thru the strat, and in the case I really need to level some pet, I then (likely) exclude strats that are mentioning things like “RNG”, “risk”, etc. But: I’m always happy (when using a new strat) when I see some detailed infos, so that I can estimate what is going to happen. But YMMV.

I am a simple pet battler looking to up my rotation.
Currently I just do the garrison daily and the gnomeregan daily. As well as the pet battles from the two islands. What is the next step for me in pet battling?

A lot depends on your roster - what pets you currently have, at what levels, and what breeds. More pets, fully levelled and made Blue, of the right breeds, makes everything easier. Since you haven't linked to a WoW character here, I can't see that, and it's hard to make specific suggestions.

1. Collecting. Some people collect pets with not a lot of regard for their battling capabilities. However, since some pets are achieved only by battling, for example Wicker Wraith and Stunted Direhorn, even collectors need to pay some attantion to battling.

2. Achieving. There are many pet battling achievements in game, and following the natural trail through the Taming [Continent] achievements up to Pandaria, and then on to the Spirit Tamers, Beasts of Fable and the Celestial Tournament was an epic journey for me and for many others. It's well worth doing. The Celestial Tournament is still, IMO, the pinnacle of PvE pet battling. However, WoD and Legion and BfA have added more battling achievements.

3. Roster development. Distinct from collecting, this is finding the right pets for your toolbox in the right breeds and levelling and if necessary making them Rare with stones, so that you have the right specialist pet for any possible challenge.

4. PvP. Only a small minority of pet battlers spend a lot of time in PvP, but those who do really enjoy it.

Apart from Xu-Fu's here, you can read and join resources like the official Blizzard forums for pet battles, WarcraftPets.com website, or the WarcraftPets Discord, where like-minded addic.... er, battlers ... and more than delighted to answer any questions you might have.

Only really to expand on Gráinne's comment as regards the 'collecting' and 'roster development' sections - which are, as said 'distinct' although they are intrinsically linked - I would like to point you in the direction of the in-game Achievements > Battle Pets > Collect tab. There are a series of achievements called Raiding With Leashes, pretty much all of which can be completed via the auction house - if you have the gold/inclination - or by completing old raids.
In this content-starved expansion (and it is, it's making people want to do pet battling, isn't it? XD), it's been some small relief to run (short) old content knowing there's a possibility of a worthwhile reward beyond the vague chance of some 75kG pants dropping.

Thanks so much for the replies. I think I am somewhat of a collector/roster builder. I go around doing the dailies but I also like buying pets just for their looks. I watched hazelnutty on youtube last night. I think I will focus on doing the expeditions when I have time to get all the pets that come from that. Then I will go back and do old raids like Eekwibble suggested.

Getting this error message this morning trying to use the site.."Creating a database connection failed. This is a known issue and is happening due to increased load at the time. Please reload the page to try again. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Please allow us to post code (or literal strings) as it should be. Would have been useful in my last example. Just to say it.

BTW: I tried to add the line above to my last post, and it was refused. As a new comment, obviously, it works. Something on this site is very fishy. Don’t get me wrong, your site is performing better than 85% of the whole internet, but there are still errors. And some of them are … a bit annoying.

That's because the page is a hobby project by one person who is not a professional web developer or programmer at all. Many of the quirks won't be worked on as long as there are bigger topics open. You can read through the list of tasks and bugs in the devnotes:
https://www.wow-petguide.com/index.php?m=DevLog

Regarding the versions, I don't really want to do that right now. There's already a mention of the last update time (use the downwards arrow on a strategy below the pets to open additional details)

Hey no worries :-) Hope I didn't come across as unappreciative. Feedback is good! And that you had this impression is actually a compliment, thank you very much! No need to keep silent about issues when there are issues, I just tried to explain how they came to be and why it takes so long to get stuff fixed.
Very recently an actual, professional developer has joined me and is helping out a ton, so things might become a lot better soon!

they are definitely worth a shout-out here.
One by one, the page now hosts:

Pet Powerleveling Guide
Written by Nyari and translated by Shenk, this guide explains in detail where and how to level up your pets in the most efficient ways possible, from Super-Squirt days all the way to great farming spots for wild pet battles.

Most used PvE Pets
Another addition by Nyari, a Tier list of pets depending on how often they are used in PvE strategies (against tamers or pet challenges). While not strictly necessary, the top spots on this list make a great shopping list for new battlers to be able and beat many different fights very quickly.

been having a problem for a few days with updating my pet collection. I don't see my server in the drop down list, I tried using another server and character. It updated the collection but When i try to use Magpie it doesn't recognize that I have any pets.

I know the issue isn't here as it also happens at warcraftpets as well.

I'm sorry to say, due to sudden unemployment, I've had to stop my monthly donation for the foreseeable future. I want to thank you for all the hard work and let you know I will continue to support this site again when I can.

Hey! Don't worry at all about the donation. Thank you so much for your support and donations, the page will go on and stay around. You focus on finding a positive future for yourself and I wish you all the best that you find a great new job soon!

Please stop make the page re-posting comments when reloding the page!
‌
Learned this today: posted a comment, came back later to see if there was any feedback, reloaded the page: the page posted a copy of my comment. That was not what I wanted. I just wanted to check if my comment was posted and if there were some responses. I did not want to post a copy of my comment from 5 hours ago. And, a humble guess, I think the majority of the users are not expecting such behavior either.

Nope, it didn’t. Otherwise I wouldn’t mention it. Using current Safari on macOS, haven’t checked it with FF. Sorry for the late reply; turned out that the site had logged me out silently, so I didn’t see any notifications.

OK. I’ll try it again with this comment reply. I’ll leave the page open and come back in a couple of hours to reload the page. (This was the scenario, IIRC. Though I’m not sure if the problematic comment was a real comment or a reply to a comment, like this one.) Anyway, I’ll report back then.

OK, have reloaded the page now (3 or 4 hours after posting) and… everything fine this time (that is, I got the confirmation dialog). So, no idea what did provoke the faulty behaviour the other day. The state of the cache? Or maybe I had some setting activated in the Develop menu that prevented the sheet from coming up?When/if it occurs again, I’ll post it here.

Hey! I used to have my Pet Collection imported onto the website, but it was deleted once I reconnected my battle.net account to set a character icon. Now when I try to import my collection again (even after removing the original connection), it reloads to a blank screen with "ssdfsds" in the corner.
I love the website and this is the only issue that I've ever encountered. I just wanted to bring it up! Thanks for all the wonderful work you do <3

In that Info box I only could squeeze-in the content by shortening many things, down to the gramatical limits, and by omitting some info. I know, I could continue in a comment in the comment section, but this doesn’t feel right. The essential infos should be in one place.

I’m also aware that 990 chars should be more than sufficient in most cases. But there are cases where more info is useful (like the above example), and unless there is a technical 990-characters-hard-limit, please give us more room. If someone really is misusing that box (what for?) you could always edit the post or/and contact the author.

I think we had a much stricter limit 2 weeks ago and I personally don't think this infobox needs more characters because it's there for SHORT creator comments to strategy basics or pet choices and IMHO not to explain every single RNG situation players can experience.

If you can reduce RNG with breed restrictions... then maybe it's better to add them to the pets and not explain what can go wrong with other breeds. Also, I don't see the need to comment on the level pets because that is something that belongs to your pet team (or Rematch strings if you like to add your specific ones).

Most people come here not to read walls of text, they look for the better-rated strategies that match their pet collections, copy&paste stuff they need to import into their addons and only come back if something goes horribly wrong and then mostly to find help in other peoples' comments who also struggled or to find a different team/strategy: I don't think many people wanna read about stuff that already happened to them, they mostly want to see solutions and it's the best way to have them in a well-optimized strategy&team already.

Be honest, does it help when I struggle with this specific strategy and then come back and find something like "if this is happening you are screwed" or "if this is happening and you want pet XP restart, otherwise you win without rewards for your level pet" in your creator comments? I don't think so.

This is not a basic forum so maybe it's better to continue with keeping things short ;-)

To me, certain character limits tend to be problematic not because of the length of actual content, but because of formatting tags and embedding taking up a lot of characters. This is something I experience on most of websites, not just this one, but the most aggravating issue over here is linking to user profiiles and other sources of strategies, which could be alleviated with internalisation of link paths and @mentions.

About the tooltips themselves… I don't have any clear conclusions one way or the other. Put an effort into it? It's ignored. Leave it alone to keep it tidy? You come out as oblivious and heartless. Same goes for strategies, a new one? Ignored on behalf of ones that took the spotlight first. And when it's actually noticed? It seems to outweigh another with 300+ flawless executions which somehow stays in the shadow. Therefore, I'm not sure one can account for every visitor upon creating the environment. :-) The cycle of (tamer) strife can be cruel, and I believe something needs to be done with it nevertheless – but sadly, enough of the philosophy, for at the moment the engineering of more basic aspects has to come first!

@Lazey, Part I (Sorry, the page freaks out when I’m trying to post my reply as one. So, I’ll try it in two steps ;)‌First and foremost, thanks for your reply and for your opinion. But I don’t agree with all of your points…‌

> I personally don't think this infobox needs more characters because it's there for SHORT creator comments to strategy basics or pet choices and IMHO not to explain every single RNG situation players can experience.‌IMO the part that really should be kept short and precise is the description (the steps). The Info box, I agree with you, should also be short, but if there is a need for more information, it should be dumped into the Info box. (Not into the description, not into the comments section, for two different reasons, but I think both are obvious.)‌Another possibilty would be to squeeze any meta info into the description before “Turn 1”. But this would be a cheap second Info box, and I don’t like the idea to abuse the form that way.‌> If you can reduce RNG with breed restrictions... then maybe it's better to add them to the pets and not explain what can go wrong with other breeds. ‌I think you are referring to the Env Bert strat I have linked. Basically I agree. But you might have noticed that I already had added min power to pet #2, in order to exclude some of the substitutes. Though, I didn’t wan’t to do the same with the Blazehaound (pet #1), because I think the strat is doable also with a suboptimal breed. But maybe you are right and I should just exclude any non-P/P breeds.

@Lazey, Part II
‌
> Also, I don't see the need to comment on the level pets because that is something that belongs to your pet team (or Rematch strings if you like to add your specific ones).‌
You are right here. The Rematch string is part of the Info box, and as such it should be parsed correctly. (The string that contains the correct and breed/damage-specific min health requirements). This should be enough, but, I think there are also folks that aren’t using Rematch. They also should know of the type-specific min health requirements. Unfortunatly the default forms of the page don’t offer any detailed entries for the min health. They only offer one entry (for all damage types), and I always put the worst-case min health there (for pets that are weak against the expected damage type)
‌
> Most people come here not to read walls of text, […] ‌
Well, I think, a “wall of of text” is not defined by the amount of characters. To create a wall of text you need two things: lots of characters, and lots of missing line breaks / paragraphs. I’m completely aware of that, and I’m always trying to section and format my texts in a manner that makes it usable for readers ;) I think the limit of 990 chars is not contributing to avoid walls of text. (It’s easy to build a a wall of text with only 500 chars, but I think you got what I mean…)
‌
> Be honest, does it help when I struggle with this specific strategy and then come back and find something like "if this is happening you are screwed" or "if this is happening and you want pet XP restart, otherwise you win without rewards for your level pet" in your creator comments? I don't think so. ‌
Good question. Me personally, when I use a new strat from somebody else, I always read thru the strat, and in the case I really need to level some pet, I then (likely) exclude strats that are mentioning things like “RNG”, “risk”, etc. But: I’m always happy (when using a new strat) when I see some detailed infos, so that I can estimate what is going to happen. But YMMV.

I am a simple pet battler looking to up my rotation.
Currently I just do the garrison daily and the gnomeregan daily. As well as the pet battles from the two islands. What is the next step for me in pet battling?

A lot depends on your roster - what pets you currently have, at what levels, and what breeds. More pets, fully levelled and made Blue, of the right breeds, makes everything easier. Since you haven't linked to a WoW character here, I can't see that, and it's hard to make specific suggestions.

1. Collecting. Some people collect pets with not a lot of regard for their battling capabilities. However, since some pets are achieved only by battling, for example Wicker Wraith and Stunted Direhorn, even collectors need to pay some attantion to battling.

2. Achieving. There are many pet battling achievements in game, and following the natural trail through the Taming [Continent] achievements up to Pandaria, and then on to the Spirit Tamers, Beasts of Fable and the Celestial Tournament was an epic journey for me and for many others. It's well worth doing. The Celestial Tournament is still, IMO, the pinnacle of PvE pet battling. However, WoD and Legion and BfA have added more battling achievements.

3. Roster development. Distinct from collecting, this is finding the right pets for your toolbox in the right breeds and levelling and if necessary making them Rare with stones, so that you have the right specialist pet for any possible challenge.

4. PvP. Only a small minority of pet battlers spend a lot of time in PvP, but those who do really enjoy it.

Apart from Xu-Fu's here, you can read and join resources like the official Blizzard forums for pet battles, WarcraftPets.com website, or the WarcraftPets Discord, where like-minded addic.... er, battlers ... and more than delighted to answer any questions you might have.

Only really to expand on Gráinne's comment as regards the 'collecting' and 'roster development' sections - which are, as said 'distinct' although they are intrinsically linked - I would like to point you in the direction of the in-game Achievements > Battle Pets > Collect tab. There are a series of achievements called Raiding With Leashes, pretty much all of which can be completed via the auction house - if you have the gold/inclination - or by completing old raids.
In this content-starved expansion (and it is, it's making people want to do pet battling, isn't it? XD), it's been some small relief to run (short) old content knowing there's a possibility of a worthwhile reward beyond the vague chance of some 75kG pants dropping.

Thanks so much for the replies. I think I am somewhat of a collector/roster builder. I go around doing the dailies but I also like buying pets just for their looks. I watched hazelnutty on youtube last night. I think I will focus on doing the expeditions when I have time to get all the pets that come from that. Then I will go back and do old raids like Eekwibble suggested.

Getting this error message this morning trying to use the site.."Creating a database connection failed. This is a known issue and is happening due to increased load at the time. Please reload the page to try again. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Please allow us to post code (or literal strings) as it should be. Would have been useful in my last example. Just to say it.

BTW: I tried to add the line above to my last post, and it was refused. As a new comment, obviously, it works. Something on this site is very fishy. Don’t get me wrong, your site is performing better than 85% of the whole internet, but there are still errors. And some of them are … a bit annoying.

That's because the page is a hobby project by one person who is not a professional web developer or programmer at all. Many of the quirks won't be worked on as long as there are bigger topics open. You can read through the list of tasks and bugs in the devnotes:
https://www.wow-petguide.com/index.php?m=DevLog

Regarding the versions, I don't really want to do that right now. There's already a mention of the last update time (use the downwards arrow on a strategy below the pets to open additional details)

Hey no worries :-) Hope I didn't come across as unappreciative. Feedback is good! And that you had this impression is actually a compliment, thank you very much! No need to keep silent about issues when there are issues, I just tried to explain how they came to be and why it takes so long to get stuff fixed.
Very recently an actual, professional developer has joined me and is helping out a ton, so things might become a lot better soon!